Obituaries in the News

The Associated Press

Aug. 22, 2001

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (AP) _ Kenneth Reese Cole Jr., an assistant to two presidents, died Thursday. He was 63. No cause of death was given.

Cole, who lived in Ponte Vedra Beach, headed the Domestic Council under presidents Nixon and Ford. It was formed to assist the president with intergovernmental relations.

The council's name was changed in 1978 to the Domestic Policy Staff and redesignated as the Office of Policy Development in 1981.

Betty Everett

BELOIT, Wis. (AP) _ Singer Betty Everett, whose recording of ``The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss)'' made Billboard's Top 10 in 1964, died Sunday. She was 61.

Everett is remembered primarily for one huge hit song in the 1960s, but she also recorded many other songs and was recognized as one of the top soul singers of her time.

Starting at age 9, Everett played the piano and sang in church. She continued to sing in gospel choirs before moving to Chicago in 1957, where she recorded a string of hits on local record labels such as C.J. Cobra and OneDerful that included ``I'll Be There'' and ``I've Got a Claim On You.''

Everett signed a contract in the early 1960s with VeeJay, a record label that was then issuing recordings by the Beatles.

Everett recorded ``The Shoop Shoop Song'' in the spring of 1964, and it soared to Billboard's Top 10.

The song was later recorded by Cher in the soundtrack for the 1990 movie ``Mermaids'' and more recently by Vonda Shepard of the Fox television show ``Ally McBeal.''

Gerald Gordon

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Actor Gerald Gordon, perhaps best-known for his role as the hot-tempered neurosurgeon on the NBC-TV soap opera ``The Doctors,'' died Friday of emphysema. He was 67.

Besides his role as the quintessential anti-hero Dr. Nick Bellini on ``The Doctors,'' Gordon played Dr. Mark Dante on ABC-TV's ``General Hospital.

Gordon won an Emmy Award in 1976 for his portrayal of Andrew Jackson in NBC-TV's ``First Ladies' Diaries: Rachel Jackson.''

He also appeared on ``Have Gun Will Travel,'' ``Dallas,'' ``Naked City,'' ``Twilight Zone,'' ``Highway to Heaven,'' ``Baywatch'' and ``Law & Order.''

In TV movies, he was cast as F. Lee Bailey in ``The Patty Hearst Story'' and Norman Vincent Peale's son Robert in ``One Man's Way.''

Stephen Gorove

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) _ Stephen Gorove, an authority on space law and a professor emeritus of law at the University of Mississippi, died Monday. He was 83.

For many years, Gorove represented the American Society of International Laws before the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. He chaired the committee's 1984 meeting in Vienna.

Gorove, who joined the Ole Miss law school faculty in 1965, helped establish the NASA-funded National Remote Sensing and Space Law Center of Excellence on the Oxford campus last year.

He founded the Journal of Space Law at Ole Miss in 1974, a publication devoted to the legal problems of human activities in outer space.

In 1977, the World Congress of the International Astronautical Federation, consisting of 37 nations, awarded him a testimonial for his contributions to the development of space law.

Sigmund Nissenbaum

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) _ Sigmund Nissenbaum, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto best known for his work restoring Jewish cemeteries and cultural monuments across Poland, died Aug. 11. He was 75. No cause of death was given.

Born in Warsaw in 1926, Nissenbaum and his family were moved to the Warsaw ghetto and later deported to the Treblinka concentration camp. Toward the end of the war, Nissenbaum was sent with his father and brother to a labor camp near Offenburg, Germany.

After the war he remained in Germany, settling in Constance, where he set up successful real estate and import-export businesses.

Nissenbaum also built a synagogue and revived the Jewish community there. In the early 1980s he became active in Germany's Jewish community, working toward reconciliation between Germans and Jews.

In 1983, he returned to his native Poland for the first time in 40 years and was shocked to see Jewish graves in disrepair. Two years later, he set up the Nissenbaum Foundation in Warsaw, to renovate Jewish cemeteries and synagogues throughout Poland, including Lelov and Bobov.

Xavier Orville

FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) _ Xavier Orville, a novelist and a former cultural adviser to two Senegalese presidents, died of cancer Sunday. He was 69.

He wrote some 15 novels, but was not widely translated beyond the French-speaking world. With surreal imagery, Orville's works detailed the day-to-day life of the black residents of the Caribbean island of Martinique.

He was closely associated with the negritude movement, a celebration of African culture in literature.

The movement was founded in Paris in the 1930s by poet Aime Cesaire, Martinique's best-known writer, and Leopold Sedar Senghor, who led Senegal to independence from France in 1960.

Beginning in 1979, Orville served as cultural adviser to Senghor, who was also a writer.

Until 1982, Orville remained in Senegal as cultural adviser to Abdou Diouf, who succeeded Senghor in 1980.

Kim Stanley

NEW YORK (AP) _ Kim Stanley, acclaimed as one of the theater's finest actresses in plays like ``Bus Stop,'' ``A Touch of the Poet'' and ``Picnic,'' died Monday of cancer. She was 76.

Stanley came of age on Broadway in the 1950s. She was part of a new generation of actresses such as Julie Harris, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton and Barbara Bel Geddes who illuminated the plays of William Inge, Tennessee Williams and Horton Foote.

Stanley never became as famous as her contemporaries, possibly because she made few movies or television appearances and many of her theater performances were in plays that had brief runs. And her best-known stage role, Cherie, the goodhearted chanteuse in Inge's 1955 comedy, ``Bus Stop,'' went to Marilyn Monroe in the movies.

Her other roles on Broadway were varied _ ranging from the tomboy sister in Inge's ``Picnic'' (1953) to a young bride deserted by her husband in Foote's short-lived ``The Traveling Lady'' (1954) to the celebrated Actors Studio Theater revival of Chekhov's ``The Three Sisters'' (1964) _ her last New York stage appearance.

Stanley received a best-actress Oscar nomination for portraying a crazed medium in 1964's ``Seance on a Wet Afternoon,'' and a second _ in the supporting category _ for playing Frances Farmer's mother in ``Frances'' (1982).

She won two Emmy awards _ one for a 1963 appearance in a ``Ben Casey'' episode and another for her role as Big Mama in a PBS production of ``Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.''

Prince A. Taylor Jr.

PRINCETON, N.J. (AP) _ Bishop Prince A. Taylor Jr., a clergyman and educator who was the first black bishop in the Methodist denomination to serve a predominantly white conference, died Aug. 15 of cancer. He was 94.

Taylor was the oldest bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was a founding member of the World Methodist Council, of which he was a past chairman.

Elected to the episcopacy in 1956, his first posting as bishop was to Monrovia, Liberia, where he worked for eight years.

He served in New Jersey from 1964 to 1976, the first African-American bishop in the Methodist denomination to head a predominantly white conference.